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It’s a Culture Thing
There's a new study out this week from the Burton Group, looking at the experience of 21 companies that have adopted social networking
tools. What they've found is that while these businesses recognized the potential benefits and have been able to deploy the supporting technology, they're not having the expected success. The problem is
that in the top-down cultures of most organizations, employees are hesitant to share openly with their colleagues, let alone with customers and the outside world. So even firms that had sound business
drivers for social networking projects are having "a noticeable level of uncertainty" about the business case and the ROI. Most are struggling forward anyway, believing that social networking
is needed to meet the expectations of younger workers, and that it will ultimately enhance collaboration and knowledge sharing.
To early KM practitioners, this is deja vu all over again. You could
take this survey, replace all references to Social Networking with Knowledge Management and it would be eerily reminiscent of the KM work being done a decade ago. Once again, there's no consensus on how
to measure the value, a reluctance to embrace the new and a lack of trust about how management will respond to sharing information. Knowledge is still seen as power, and people still hesitate to give it
away.
Some of this is a generational phenomena, but a lot of Facebook's recent
growth has been driven by the over-55 demographic. So the times, they may be changing.
The Sixth Sense
One of the highlights of this year's Technology, Entertainment & Design conference (better known as TED) was a "sixth sense" device that's being developed by a team at MIT. Students working in Pattie Maes' lab have put together some off-the-shelf components, building a Web cam and a battery-powered projector into a kind of pendant
that's worn on a lanyard. It serves as an input and output device for a cell phone, which rides along in the user's pocket to handle the processing and network connectivity. The result is something out
of Minority Report. The device can recognize objects in the physical world and associate them with information from the virtual
world.
It also interprets hand gestures, so (for example) you can take a picture just by framing an image with your fingers. It projects information (maps, status updates, Amazon book ratings) on
any blank surface, and the user can then interact with this projection as if it were a touch screen. The idea is to provide seamless access to relevant information where and when you need it. For $350 in
parts, it delivers a game-changing experience. Wireless PDAs do this kind of data retrieval already, of course, but having a device that can see what you're seeing and respond in useful and interesting
ways is quite different. You might find it a little creepy, or think it's the neatest thing since sliced bread. Either way, you should watch the video. It's under nine minutes long.
Hijacked by Technology
Back in the second year of Knowledge Street, our old colleague Alan Brompton suggested a Directions
article entitled "How KM has been Hijacked by Technology." The other articles in this issue brought that idea to mind, and we thought the concept worth revisiting. We've also added a little
news blog at knowledgestreet.com, and looking for content to publish there has reaffirmed the problem. If you do news searches for "Knowledge Management" virtually everything you find is
ultimately about software.
The same is true of KM World's annual "100 Companies That Matter"
list of KM thought leaders. From A2ia (software for intelligent handwriting recognition) to Zylab (a
maker of "Information Access Solutions") it would appear that KM exists entirely within the realm of bits and bytes. It seems to be all about search engines, document management and tagging.
It's the way the market has been going since the beginning, but it's a little sad that KM World doesn't recognize a single company that focuses on the soft side of the issue. No change management firms
or process consultants or organizational learning specialists.
Practitioners understand that KM won’t work unless you have the right culture in place. It's too bad that's such a hard sell, and
that it's so much easier to sell software. Maybe when the benefits remain so hard to measure, people need to buy something they can actually see.
In Defense of WILBing
Another interesting study by the University of Melbourne was reported by Reuters last week. It found that employees who engaged in Workplace Internet Leisure Browsing (or WILBing) tended to outperform those who did not. It seems that the "short and unobtrusive" breaks afforded by watching something on YouTube or checking in with Facebook lead to a higher net concentration level during the day.
The implication is that companies that invest in software to block any Web access that's not work-related may be missing the point. Requiring workers to approach their job in a specific and
highly-controlled way, using only officially-sanctioned tools and applications, stifles innovation and does nothing for morale. And at least in some cases, it doesn't improve productivity either. To be
fair, the study looked only at workers who browsed in moderation. Those with Internet addiction tendencies were less productive.
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